Chapter 35
Chase turned back toward the stove, muttering something under his breath about her being "judgmental as hell" while he stirred the sauce with an amount of competence that still felt deeply offensive.
Aria stayed leaning against the kitchen island, arms crossed loosely over her chest, watching him with narrowed eyes.
Because something about this still wasn't adding up.
"You still haven't answered my question," she said after a moment.
He glanced over his shoulder. "What question?"
"How," she said slowly, gesturing toward the stove, "are you cooking?"
He blinked once.
Actually paused.
Like the answer had not occurred to him as strange until she said it out loud.
Then he shrugged, turning the heat down beneath the sauce.
"I taught myself."
Her brows lifted immediately.
"You?"
"Yeah."
The answer came almost sheepishly.
Like he was suddenly embarrassed by it.
"I mean..." He rubbed the back of his neck and gave a quiet huff of laughter. "It definitely wasn't because I woke up one day magically good at it."
Something in her expression shifted.
Careful.
Vulnerable.
Because there it was again.
The thing neither of them quite knew how to touch yet.
Emily.
Not spoken.
Still sitting somewhere quietly between them.
And maybe because she was tired.
Maybe because Parker's words had settled somewhere deeper than she realized.
Maybe because seeing the towel warmer and candle had cracked something open inside her, she asked anyway.
"Did she teach you?"
The question landed gently in the room.
Not accusatory.
Not bitter.
Just honest.
Chase stilled for half a second before shaking his head.
"No."
The answer came quickly.
Almost immediately.
"She didn't teach me."
Something she hated admitting loosened slightly inside her chest.
Relief.
God.
She hated that relief lived there.
He turned the burner lower and leaned back against the counter, thinking for a moment like he was trying to sort through old boxes inside his head.
"After I got out of the hospital," he started quietly, "they had me staying in this little military housing place. Kinda like a duplex apartment situation on base."
His expression shifted as he spoke.
Distant but not detached, he was remembering.
"I lived alone for a while before me and Emily were..." He paused, searching for the word carefully. "Serious, I guess."
A strange ache moved through Aria's chest.
Not jealousy exactly.
Not entirely.
Just grief for years she had never gotten to witness.
Years that existed without her.
Years somebody else had known.
He glanced back toward the stove.
"I remember standing in this tiny kitchen and realizing I didn't know if I could cook."
A humorless little laugh slipped out of him.
"Which sounds stupid now."
"No," she said quietly. "It doesn't."
Because losing your memories meant losing things most people never even thought about.
Simple things, instinctive things.
Did he know how to tie his shoes?
Did he know his favorite color?
Did he know how to make coffee?
He nodded absently, staring down at the spoon in his hand.
"I kept trying to remember if I knew how. And I couldn't."
A pause.
"So I ate ramen for like..." He grimaced. "Way too long."
"That is the craziest statement I have ever heard come out of your mouth, on so many levels," she muttered.
He pointed at her without looking. "You're mean."
"You caught noodles on fire."
He ignored that.
"But one night," he continued, quieter now, "I got this random craving."
He frowned slightly, like even now it confused him.
"Chicken Alfredo."
Her breath caught.
Just slightly.
He didn't notice.
Or maybe he did and was pretending not to.
"It was driving me crazy," he said. "Like one of those things you can't stop thinking about for no reason."
A pause.
"I couldn't figure out why I wanted it so bad.".
Her throat tightened, because chicken Alfredo had always been her favorite.
Not restaurant Alfredo.
No jar sauce.
The homemade kind.
The one she made on birthdays.
On bad days.
On nights they needed comfort food.
Alfredo was their inside joke, he swore one day he would learn to hate alfredo because she cooked it so much. He never refused it though and he never complained when she placed it in front of him.
He kept talking, unaware of the war quietly happening inside her chest.
"So I looked up a video." A faint smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "Chef Ramsay, you know the really aggressive guy on YouTube who yelled about garlic like it owed him money."
A laugh escaped her before she could stop it. "That sounds very educational."
"It was traumatic."
He smiled at her over his shoulder as he continued to stir the sauce.
"I messed it up the first six times."
"Only six?"
"Hey, give me a break I had to learn everything from scratch." His shoulders shook with a quiet laugh before he looked back down again. "But I kept trying," he said. "Eventually got decent."
A pause.
"Then cooking just kinda..."
He shrugged.
"Stuck."
The room softened around them for a second the music low in the background, the simmering sauce, the warmth from the oven, and then his expression changed.
"Actually..." He frowned. "I think..." He stopped. Like something had clicked into place.
"What?" she asked softly.
He leaned against the counter, brows furrowed.
"It's weird."
A pause.
"But now that things are coming back..."
His eyes drifted briefly toward her. Then the kitchen. The house. Something deeper settling behind his expression.
"I don't think it was random."
Her chest tightened immediately.
"What do you mean?"
He exhaled slowly.
"When I was there..." His voice softened. "I didn't have anything. No home, no memories, no people and no..." He hesitated. "You."
He took a deep breath having said that then he placed the wooden spoon in its holder wiping his hand on the towel before he glanced in her direction once more.
"I didn't have anything that connected me back to..." He gestured vaguely. "Me."
Another pause.
"But now?"
He looked around the kitchen. At the stove, at her, and at stupid things like the cat clock on the wall with it's waving arms and moving eyes
An almost embarrassed smile crossed his face.
"The mold."
She snorted immediately.
"Oh my God. Do not start about Carl again."
"Carl," he repeated dryly. "Which still feels deeply concerning for me how attached you are over mold. It's not just Carl it is the towel warmer, the porch, your apple shampoo." A pause. "The Alfredo."
His expression shifted into something sadder now.
Something that looked dangerously close to grief.
"I think maybe my brain was trying..."
Her breath caught. "What, trying to what?"
"To remember."
The words came quieter.
"I just didn't have anything there to connect the dots."
God.
That nearly undid her.
Because suddenly she understood what he was saying. His craving for Alfredo, the thing he had desperately needed to learn how to make for no reason he understood, had been because of her.
Some buried part of him trying to claw his way back.
Trying to remember home.
Trying to remember her.
Even when he didn't know her.
Her eyes burned and she looked away before he could see it.
Because crying over pasta felt humiliating.
"You okay?" he asked quietly.
She laughed softly, the sound came out broken around the edges.
"No." She crossed her arms tighter around her body as she was trying to hold herself together.
"It's just..."
God.
How did she explain this?
"It's hard hearing that."
A pause.
"Hearing pieces of me still existed somewhere inside your mind even when most of me was gone."
The truth settled quietly between them. Chase looked wrecked, actually wrecked.
Like the sentence hurt somewhere physical.
"Aria..."
He stepped toward her instinctively. Then stopped himself because he was still learning where her lines lay and still trying not to cross them.
His jaw tightened.
"I think..." he said quietly, "I've been trying to come back to you for a long time. Longer than even I understood."
He cleared his throat after a moment and motioned awkwardly toward the table.
"Dinner?" The word came softer. It was an offering now peace treaty.
She nodded.
The Alfredo was outrageously good, annoyingly good, it was the kind of good that made her irrationally angry.
She sat back after the third bite and narrowed her eyes at him.
"This is offensive."
Chase looked entirely too pleased with himself.
"That good?"
She pointed her fork at him accusingly.
"You don't get to have emotional breakthroughs and suddenly become attractive and domestic."
He nearly choked on his drink.
"...Attractive?"
Her eyes widened immediately. "Oh my God." She pointed aggressively at the pasta. "The pasta, I meant the pasta."
He looked completely unconvinced.
"Mhm."
"You're annoying."
His mouth twitched.
"You used to like that about me."
And damn it...
There it was again.
That terrifying feeling of home.
Chase watched her for a moment longer than he probably should have.
There was something deeply unfair about the way she looked sitting across from him in oversized clothes and fuzzy socks, exhaustion still clinging to her like a second skin while somehow still managing to look like home.
The kitchen light softened the edges of her face, catching the damp strands of hair that still curled slightly from the bath. She looked tired.
Still sitting across from him.
Still trying.
Even after everything.
He looked back down at his plate for a second, mostly because staring at her too long lately felt dangerous.
Every time he let himself sit in the feeling too long, something inside him twisted painfully around the realization that he had lost years with her.
Years he couldn't reclaim. Years somebody else had lived beside him.
Years she had spent grieving him while he had unknowingly kept breathing on the other side of the world.
The guilt of that sat heavy.
Not because he had chosen any of it.
But because she still had to survive it anyway.
"You're staring," Aria said quietly, twirling pasta around her fork without looking up.
The comment pulled him out of his head.
He blinked once then he was looking away, knowing he was caught.
"Was not."
Her brows lifted immediately. "You absolutely were."
"Well, you just can't go and make fuzzy socks look that good and not expect me to look."
"That so?"
The corner of his mouth twitched despite himself He was beginning to notice how the way silence between them no longer felt sharp.
The way their conversation moved naturally, instinctively.
It scared him a little at how fast they were snapping back into place.
He felt like he was skating on thin ice and the closer they became the more he had to lose if he screwed this up.
Because for the first time since coming back, he could almost feel the shape of what they used to be and for the first time. He wanted it badly enough to terrify himself.
His fork moved absently through the Alfredo while he tried to find the right words for something he had been thinking about since Parker left that morning.
"Can I ask you something?" he said finally.
Aria looked up immediately, guardedness flickering faintly into place.
She was not defensive, just careful.
He noticed that now.
The way she protected herself before hard conversations.
"You can ask anything," she said carefully.
He nodded once then hesitated anyway, because somehow this felt bigger than he intended.
"When I was gone..."
He stopped, the wording still felt strange.
Gone.
Dead.
Missing.
Nothing about it fit neatly.
"When everybody thought I was dead," he corrected quietly, "did you..."
His jaw shifted. Why was this hard?
"Did you ever hate me?"
The question settled into the room quietly.
Soft music still drifted somewhere in the background. The candle fragrance from upstairs still lingered in the air. Outside, night had settled fully over the house, dark stretching beyond the kitchen windows.
Aria looked at him for a long second.
Really looked at him and for once, she didn't rush an answer.
"No," she said finally. "I hated what happened. I hated the military and I hated every person who looked me in the face and told me to move on."
Her throat shifted slightly. "I hated funerals."
Something sad flickered across her face.
"I hated waking up every morning and remembering all over again that you were gone."
The honesty in her voice settled heavily between them.
"But I never hated you."
Her fingers tightened slightly around the fork.
"Sometimes I was angry."
The confession came softer now.
More vulnerable.
"I was angry you left that morning." A tiny humorless laugh escaped her. "Which sounds ridiculous because obviously you didn't know what was going to happen to you."
Her eyes dropped briefly to her plate. "But grief doesn't really care about logic."
Another pause.
"There were days I got angry because you promised me you'd come home no matter what."
He couldn't fully remember saying it, but somehow he knew himself enough to know he probably had made her that promise.
"And then," she continued more quietly, "there were days I felt guilty for being angry because I knew if you could've come back, you would've."
Silence settled softly around them.
Chase swallowed hard against something tight in his throat because no version of this stopped hurting... no version of this felt fair.
His voice came quieter when he finally spoke.
"I'm sorry."
Aria looked up immediately.
And maybe once...
Years ago...
She would have told him not to apologize, she would have softened it on him, and made him feel better.
But tonight, something in her stayed honest to her feelings.
"I know," she said softly. "The hurt just can't always see reason."
And strangely, that felt more intimate than forgiveness because she wasn't excusing it and she wasn't pretending none of this hadn't broken her.
She was just telling him the truth and trusting him enough to sit inside it with her.
He looked down for a second avoiding her pain ridden eyes, then quietly he added his own truth.
"I think I'm scared." The admission surprised even him.
Aria's expression softened slightly. "Of what?"
He exhaled slowly, leaning back in his chair. "That I'm never gonna fully come back. The I will just get pieces."
He gestured vaguely toward the kitchen.
"The food, the towel warmer, the stupid mold, and the football on the bookshelf in the office" He paused there swallowing past the lump in his throat and trying to clear the pain away so his voice wouldn't crack as he finished speaking.
"But then there are giant holes." His jaw tightened slightly. "And I keep wondering what happens if I never remember enough."
The vulnerability in his voice caught her off guard.
Because underneath all the guilt and trauma, he was genuinely afraid.
Not of his scars or of the pain but of losing himself and maybe of losing her too.
Aria sat quietly for a moment before setting her fork down.
"You wanna know something?" she asked softly.
His eyes lifted.
"What?"
Her expression shifted into something gentler.
Sadder.
"People change."
A pause.
"You left when we were young."
Another pause.
"I'm not the exact same person either."
Her fingers traced absently around the edge of her glass.
"Before everything happened, I thought life could be easy if you just loved people enough."
A quiet laugh left her.
"I definitely don't think that anymore."
His mouth twitched faintly.
"But," she continued quietly, "I don't think the goal is for you to become exactly who you were."
That made him pause.
Because Naomi had said something similar.
"I think the goal," she said carefully, "is figuring out who you are now."
She stopped talking for a minute so she could look him in the eyes while she revealed her heart to him before she shared her deepest fear.
"And whether we still fit now or not we can't know yet, because let's be honest neither one of us is the same as when we last saw each other before your left... we have both changed... we both now carry scars."
The honesty of it settled heavily between them.
Painfully.
Because neither of them actually knew the answer yet.